Thursday, January 05, 2006
LISP is 48 years old this year (50 if go all the way back to it's inception). That's scary. It's scary that Jon McCarthy was so visionary, but from another point of view it's scary that programming languages have changed so little in 50 years.
From what I can see all that's really happened is that computer hardware has caught up with the ideas. LISP in 1958 was heavy and cumbersome, but today the "exiting new languages" like python and ruby are heavier and more cumbersome than LISP is without delivering any more power (indeed many people will argue that LISP and it's direct decendent, Scheme, offer more power than either python or ruby do yet).
What's exciting is that a larger development community is really starting to buy into some of the solid foundations that LISP originated when they see how swift and pleasant development with Python and Ruby can be. I'm even noticing that there are more and more young developers playing with LISP and Scheme themeselves. Just another sign that the increased communication and sense of community between developers that the internet age has brought about is truely changing the way we work.
They key to doing things the best way possible is to be exposed to the best ideas. Corporate environments don't traditionally expose people to those ideas - indeed corporate developers used to only get information about languages delivered to them via narrow channels controlled by yet more corporations.
Companies selling solutions found it all too easy to write off ideas coming from the university's as "Ivory tower". Just a few years ago I worked for a company who told me that languages like Python and Ruby weren't "business languages". Now I work for a business that uses Python as it's primary development language. No need to guess which company is the more productive.
A couple of years back Paul Graham said something inflamatory to the effect that if you code in Python you'll get smart developers to work for you, and if you code in Java you won't. That's a fairly extreme statement, and I realise it's become really fashionable to bash Paul Graham of late, but I have to say I agree with him. I have the strongest feeling that the average hacker from the LISP or Scheme community is a lot more productive than the average C# developer.
